Opinion | ICE Is Dangerously Inaccurate

Tracy Nuetzi, a Trump voter and resident of Florida, was an American citizen for 60 years, until the country decided she wasn’t.

“I thought, ‘This is a mistake, this must be a mistake,’” she said. Ms. Nuetzi spent nearly a year, from December 2017 to November 2018, trying to prove she was an American, and not liable to be arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

ICE is not, of course, just a run-of-the-mill government bureaucracy doing necessary work to keep our borders intact. Under President Trump, a wildly invigorated ICE has become an American nightmare, nothing less than the main thrust of an attempt to institutionalize racism against a scapegoated minority — undocumented, nonvoting, mostly voiceless brown people.

ICE is Trump’s main instrument for the dirty work of trying to make America whiter again, without regard for family values, due process, human rights or even plain human decency. The agency has been a problem for decades, but American citizens often ignore it, content in the belief that their citizenship will prevent them from ICE, deportation, detention without representation and all those horrific stories written about other people.

But ICE makes mistakes. American citizens can get caught in its maw — even white Americans. According to the Cato Institute, from 2006 to 2017 ICE wrongfully detained more than 3,500 U.S. citizens in Texas alone. Even in Rhode Island, ICE issued 462 detainers for people listed as U.S. citizens over a 10-year period, according to the A.C.L.U. From 2017 to 2019, A.C.L.U. data showed that law enforcement detained 420 citizens in Ms. Nuetzi’s state of Florida, at ICE’s request. Eighty-three of those requests have been canceled, and the people released. The rest remain in detention, waiting for ICE, according to the A.C.L.U. report. Even though ICE detainers should lapse after 48 hours, local law enforcement often continues to hold people until the agency gets around to checking them.

Ms. Nuetzi is a cheerful white woman who spent her childhood in Ocala, Fla., and has been an elementary school secretary in Gainesville for 20 years. In 2016, she voted for Donald Trump, and was ecstatic when he won. A year later, her driver’s license expired.

Ms. Nuetzi went to the motor vehicles agency to get a new one, and for the first time in her life, officials did not accept her birth certificate. She could have used a passport, but hers had long expired; the last time she traveled abroad, she was 12. With her birth certificate suddenly invalid, she couldn’t get a new passport, meaning she couldn’t get a driver’s license.

Never once was she asked for her Social Security number, which would have proved that she worked as a teenager starting in 1974. To get a passport, you need proof of citizenship and a photo ID: A Social Security number is not an accepted form of identification there. With an invalidated birth certificate and no passport, Ms. Nuetzi had no paperwork to prove she belonged in the United States.

Ms. Nuetzi was born in Montreal to two U.S. citizens who were in Canada for less than a year while working for an American company. Having two U.S. citizen parents automatically makes you a citizen under Section 301(c) of the Immigration and Nationality Act, but with restrictions tightening under the Trump administration, 60 years later, that automatic citizenship wasn’t enough.

“I called to get a new passport, and they told me to go to immigration,” Ms. Nuetzi said. “But why would I go to immigration? I’m not an immigrant. Then I called Homeland Security and the woman on the other end of the line started laughing at me.”

It proved nearly impossible for Ms. Nuetzi to extract herself from the ICE machine. If a legal citizen with the money and means to prove she belongs here cannot right the mistake without months of anguish, we cannot trust the agencies in place to correctly discern who should be kicked out. Deporting people is deplorable in and of itself; deporting people without proof that they are here illegally is obscene.

“It felt like these people put a door in front of me and then told me it was closed,” Ms. Nuetzi said.

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ICE cannot be allowed to function as it is, and it certainly should not be given more power. People will be ousted from the country with no recourse and no due process. And ICE is often wrong.

Davino Watson is a U.S. citizen who was 23 years old when ICE held him for more than three years. A New Yorker, he was eventually dropped off in Alabama with no explanation and no money. After he was released, Mr. Watson filed a complaint and a court awarded him compensation in 2016. The next year, an appeals court decided the statute of limitations for that complaint had expired while he was still in ICE custody.

Then there was Peter Sean Brown, who was born in Philadelphia and lived in the Florida Keys. ICE faxed a request to Florida authorities to hold him. He was in jail for weeks. Guadalupe Plascencia, a naturalized citizen, won a $55,000 settlement after ICE wrongfully detained her. Ada Morales and Sergio Carrillo earned their citizenship decades before they were detained. The list goes on.

We hear increasingly alarming tales of concentration-camp-like immigrant detention centers and see firsthand how many people are lost in this fray. The fact that it’s nearly impossible to prove citizenship even for someone who was born a citizen and has never lived anywhere else shows how sloppy the machinery in place is. It shows how fragile anyone’s right to live in this country is. One paperwork error and any citizenship could be on the line.

“Suddenly, I was a lady with no country,” Ms. Nuetzi said. “Where would they even send me? I’m not a Canadian citizen.”

Nearly a year after she stepped into the motor vehicle agency, Ms. Nuetzi finally got the State Department to review her case, giving her 90 days to compile and send in documentation — including her parents’ marriage license, a letter from her parents and baptism records from when she was 9. Her mother had to physically obtain another copy of her own birth certificate from her hometown in Kansas. The National Passport Center looked up a census dating back to the 1940s, showing that her grandparents were also born in the U.S.

These raids are meant to happen quickly, as agents work off old lists and files, to go into the homes of those who failed to make a court appearance or had old documentation regarding deportation from years past. These raids are meant to target those with children, increasing the risk of separating families, as well. The raids won’t leave room for the meticulous detail work required for the burden of proof. They don’t allow time for people to do the exhaustive groundwork to prove something that, to them, has always been true — that they are supposed to be here.

For more than a year, Ms. Nuetzi was scared that she’d lost her country. If we can’t trust our system with a case like hers, how can we trust it with immediate border deportations?

“I don’t think anyone should be treated like that, period,” said Ms. Nuetzi.

In the end, she finally was granted a passport.

During her ordeal, she thought about contacting the president via Facebook to ask for his personal intervention in her case. She ended up doing it all on her own, but she said she continues to believe Mr. Trump will “make America great again.” She intends to vote for him in 2020.